Hitler's Hangman (51 page)

then, Hitler had rejected this initiative, but the idea continued to resurface

over the following years, most notably in the spring of 1941 when Goebbels

urged Hitler to reconsider the possibility of marking the Jews.117

Deteriorating morale on the home front in the summer of 1941 was

closely connected with the revival of the marking plans. Although the

Wehrmacht advanced swiftly into Soviet territory after the invasion of

22 June 1941 and achieved some remarkable early victories over its

surprised Red Army adversary, many Germans feared that, this time,

Hitler had gone too far. Starting that July the SD noted a clear decline in

confidence, along with fears that the campaign against the Soviet Union

could develop into an extended conflict of indefinite duration and heavy

losses. These pessimistic assessments were aggravated by the worsening

supply situation and repeated British bombing raids on western German

cities.118 As Goebbels noted in his diary on 12 August, he and other Nazi

leaders were convinced that the Jews were responsible for the deterio-

rating morale by spreading rumours and acting as ‘mood spoilers’. By

making them visible as Jews, Goebbels hoped to render it impossible for

them ‘to speak in the name of the German people’.119

Three days after this diary entry, on 15 August, a conference was held at

the Propaganda Ministry concerning the marking issue. Eichmann partici-

pated in the conference as Heydrich’s representative and confirmed that his

boss was seeking a direct decision on the matter by the Führer. Eichmann

also told the other delegates that the RSHA was already working on a

‘partial evacuation’ of Jews from large cities in the Old Reich.120

Hitler’s approval of the marking proposal on 18 August was a decision

influenced less by Goebbels’s personal intervention than by the Führer’s

general change of mind on the issue of deporting German Jews from the

Reich.121 Word of Hitler’s approval spread fast in Berlin. As the Foreign

Office’s Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, recorded in a note for his boss

Luther on 21 August, Eichmann had ‘informed me confidentially that . . .

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Hey[drich] had received a telex from the Führer’s headquarters according

to which the Führer had approved the marking of Jews in Germany’.122

Eichmann’s phone call was a deliberate attempt to demonstrate to the

Foreign Office that Heydrich and his Jewish experts were already working

on the implementation of Hitler’s order. While the Reich Interior Ministry

was still contemplating potential exceptions from the marking decree, such

as Jews living in ‘privileged mixed marriages’, Heydrich’s RSHA processed

the marking regulations with extraordinary speed. Already on 1 September,

scarcely two weeks after Hitler’s decision, Heydrich signed the ‘police regu-

lation on the marking of Jews’.123 Heydrich’s order not only stigmatized all

German Jews over the age of six by forcing them to wear a clearly visible

yellow star with the word ‘Jew’ printed on it, but also included regulations

on ‘no-go areas’ for Jews and prohibited them from leaving their places of

residence without police permission.124

More detailed instructions from Heydrich followed over the next

few weeks, and he personally informed the representatives of the

Reich’s remaining Jewish organizations of the coming measures.125 On

8 September, Paul Eppstein from the Reich Association of Jews in

Germany and Josef Löwenherz from the Israelite Congregation of Vienna

were summoned to the RSHA to be acquainted with the details relating

to the distribution of the ‘Jewish stars’. They were given three days to

complete their task of distributing the badges at a price of 10 pfennigs per

piece.126 Yet although he had approved the marking of German Jews in

August, Hitler remained reluctant to authorize their deportation. In

September, encouraged by the Wehrmacht’s successes on the Eastern

Front, which would soon lead to the encirclement of Leningrad and Kiev,

he was prepared to revise his position on this issue and to make a number

of decisions that were far-reaching both for the further escalation of Nazi

genocidal policies and for Heydrich’s personal and professional life.127

Crucially, in response to the rise of resistance activities in the Protectorate

and as a result of his expressed wish to make Prague one of the first ‘Jew

free’ cities in the Greater German Empire, Hitler decided, in late

September, to replace his ‘weak’ representative in Prague, Baron von

Neurath, with Heydrich. Back in 1939, Neurath, an arch-conservative but

well-mannered and internationally respected Swabian aristocrat and

career-diplomat, had been a strategic appointment, a choice driven by

Hitler’s desire to appease London, where Neurath had once served as an

ambassador to the court of St James’s. Heydrich’s appointment, by

contrast, was dictated by the necessities of total war. As intended by Hitler,

Heydrich’s appointment as acting Reich Protector had immediate ramifi-

cations for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. Beginning on 1 October

1941, less than a week after his arrival in Prague, the Protectorate’s Office

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for Jewish Emigration ordered the Jewish Religious Congregation of

Prague, by now terrorized into complete compliance, to begin the process

of registering anew every Jew in the Protectorate. Heydrich did not trust

the figures produced under the ‘lax’ regime of Neurath, whom he suspected

of having little understanding of racial matters. In Prague alone thirty-

seven members of the Jewish congregation worked almost ceaselessly and

under the threat of deportation, at times registering 2,000 people per day.

Denunciations from the German and Czech population were actively

encouraged and proved crucial in identifying Jews.128

On 10 October, Heydrich chaired a meeting in Prague with Eichmann

and other race and settlement experts in attendance. According to the

transcript, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss ways in which the

Jewish problem in the Protectorate and the Reich could be resolved.

Heydrich announced that Hitler demanded that ‘al Jews be removed from

this German space by the end of the year’ and noted that ‘al pending ques-

tions [regarding the Jewish policy] must be solved immediately. Even the

transportation question must not present any problems.’ Fol owing their

concentration in ‘temporary col ection camps’, notably in Theresienstadt

(Terezín), the Jews of the Protectorate were to be deported to Łódź. In

view of predictable objections from the local authorities in Łódź, however,

50,000 of the ‘most burdensome’ Jews – those least capable of work – were

to be shipped to Minsk and Riga. The leaders of Einsatzgruppen B and C,

Nebe and Rasch, would make space for some of these Jews and others

from the Reich ‘in the camps for Communist prisoners’. An additional

5,000 Gypsies were to be sent from Austria to Riga.129

In a press announcement issued the following day, Heydrich summa-

rized the results of the meeting: the ‘final aim’, he stated, was not merely

to exclude Jewry from social and economic life, but to ‘resettle them

outside Europe’ and to do so ‘as quickly as possible.’ Four days later, on

15 October, the deportations from Prague began with daily transports

carrying 1,000 people each.130

Heydrich clearly envisaged the deportation of the Central European

Jews as no more than a first step towards a pan-European solution, a plan

which, as he underlined in a meeting with representatives of Rosenberg’s

Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 4 October and again in

a letter to the army’s Quartermaster General of 6 November, would ulti-

mately lead to the ‘total evacuation of Jews from Europe’.131

Shortly after the beginning of the deportations of Jews from the

Protectorate and the Reich, all exit possibilities from German-controlled

Europe were closed. When on 13 October the Spanish Foreign Office

proposed to expel 2,000 Spanish Jews residing in France to Spanish

Morocco, Heydrich rejected the proposal on two grounds. First, he

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believed that the Spanish government had neither the will nor the deter-

mination to guard the Jews effectively in Morocco. Secondly, ‘these Jews

would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic

solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war’.132

Emigration was clearly no longer part of Heydrich’s solution to the

Jewish question. On 18 October, one day after he had informed Luther in

the Foreign Office of his objection to the Spanish government’s proposal,

he and Himmler took a more general decision on the issue of Jewish

emigration. ‘No emigration by Jews to overseas’, Himmler noted in his

diary after a telephone conversation with Heydrich.133 On 23 October, the

emigration gates were officially closed. All of Europe’s Jews were now to

be included in the final-solution project.

Yet the implementation of even the limited deportation programme

authorized by Hitler continued to pose practical problems. One of the

most pressing issues – the question of reception areas – remained unre-

solved; and if Heydrich hoped that the deportees from the Reich could

be temporarily lodged in occupied Poland before being sent into the

Soviet Union after the German victory, local officials on the ground took

a very different view. In early October, Friedrich Uebelhoer, the District

President of Łódź, lodged a vehement protest against the intended transfer

of 60,000 German Jews to the already overcrowded Łódź ghetto.134

An infuriated Heydrich, appal ed by Uebelhoer’s ‘oppositional attitude’,

threatened to draw ‘appropriate conclusions’ should he not change his

‘hostile manner’.135 In the end, Heydrich had to settle for a compromise

and the number of deportees sent to Łódź was subsequently scaled down

to 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies. As an immediate alternative solution,

Heydrich advised Himmler that the ghettos of Riga and Minsk would

have to accommodate 50,000 additional Jews, predominantly from the

Protectorate.136

While unfriendly letters were still being exchanged between Himmler,

Heydrich and Uebelhoer, Heydrich met with high-ranking officials from

Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in order to

address a second problem: the issue of overlapping competences in the

Eastern territories. Ever since Hitler had declared that Himmler’s juris-

diction as Reich commissioner for the strengthening of Germandom,

previously confined to Poland, was to be extended to the newly occupied

territories of the Soviet Union, clashes between Rosenberg and Himmler

had become the norm.137

Heydrich now suggested that a co-ordinated approach to the Jewish

question would be useful, especially in preventing pseudo-economic

considerations from jeopardizing any ‘plan of a total resettlement of the

Jews from the territory occupied by us’. He complained bitterly that many

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businesses in Germany claimed Jewish labourers as ‘indispensable’ instead

of trying to employ other foreign labourers. He also expressed his dissat-

isfaction with Rosenberg’s apparently ‘uncooperative’ attitude and stressed

that ‘the implementation of the treatment of Jews’ would lie ‘in every

respect in the hands of the Security Police’.138

On the same day, Heydrich managed to convince the Foreign Office

that the Jewish problem in Serbia, where partisan activities were causing

serious disruptions, required an urgent solution. Heydrich and Under

Secretary Martin Luther agreed to send their Jewish experts to Belgrade

the following week. Their presence spurred on both the SD commander

on the ground, Wilhelm Fuchs, and the chief administrative officer of the

military occupation regime in Serbia, Harald Turner, to speed up the

killing of Jewish men.139 As Browning has rightly argued, the mass

murder of the male Jews of Serbia was not consciously part of a Europe-

wide final solution to the Jewish question: ‘The killing of the male Jews

emerged primarily out of local factors related to the partisan war and the

army’s reprisal policy. The victims, both Jews and Gypsies, were considered

‘expendable’ groups whose execution would satisfy the required reprisal

quotas without producing undesired political repercussions and aggra-

vating the anti-partisan struggle. The army did not operate with the

avowed aim of exterminating the entire Jewish population, and thus the

women, the children and the elderly were not killed’.140